Blind Lake

“Yes,” Marguerite said. “I think that’s true.”

He nodded. Then he cleared his throat, a phlegmy bark that reminded her just how old he had become.

“Looks like a clear night,” he said.

“Clear and cool. You’d hardly know it’s August.”

He smiled. “Come out into the backyard, Marguerite. There’s something I want to show you.”

Tess had already found something to watch on the video panel: one of those twentieth-century black-and-white movies she was so fond of. A comedy. The jokes were either bizarre or incomprehensible, it seemed to Chris, but Tess laughed obligingly, if only at the expressions on the actors’ faces.

Chris leafed through a stack of magazines Marguerite’s father had left in the rack beside the sofa. They were all news magazines, and the oldest dated back to September of last year.

It was a year’s history in miniature. The Burbank murders, military setbacks in Lesotho, the devaluation of the Continental dollar, the Pan-Arab Alliance — and of course, above all else, the screaming headlines about Crossbank/Blind Lake.

Everything he had missed during the lockdown, history from the outside looking in.

No real details, but much speculation about the O/BEC platens. There was a sidebar explaining how Crossbank’s processors differed from the usual quantum computers: Qubits, Excitons, and Self-Evolving Code.

Another issue, dated a week later:

Crossbank had discovered an apparently artificial structure on the watery world of HR8832/B. The Crossbank processor had promptly generated a near-exact copy of the structure around itself, like a kind of spiky armor.

Was this contamination or procreation? Infection or reproduction?

Both Crossbank and Blind Lake had been immediately quarantined.

Automated probes revealed that the labyrinthine interior of the Crossbank “starfish” was a very strange place. Human volunteers retreated in confusion; robots vanished; remote telemetry quickly became unintelligible.

The now-familiar image. From the air, the six radial arms; from ground level, the iridescent arches and spongiform caverns. In the text, a note that the material from which the anomaly was constructed was “scale invariant — under a microscope, any piece looks much like the whole thing does to the human eye.”

Chris leafed ahead:

The second structure had manifested overnight in a soybean field south of Macon, Georgia. Apart from a few acres of fallow ground, it destroyed nothing and killed no one, though a curious farmhand disappeared inside it before local authorities could establish a cordon. Nevertheless, large numbers of residents had fled their homes and spread confusion across the Southeast.

(Since then five more “starfish” had appeared in isolated areas around the globe, apparently following force lines in the Earth’s magnetic field. None had proved dangerous to anyone prudent enough to avoid stepping inside.)

These had been the weeks of greatest panic. The apocalyptic pronouncements and instant cults; the hawks and the pilgrims; the blockaded highways.

Introducing Adam Sandoval, 65, owner of a Loveland, Colorado, hardware store, who had since admitted his intention of flying his aircraft directly into the Blind Lake O/BEC installation (a.k.a. the Alley), in order to prevent another manifestation of the kind that had lured his wife away from him. (Sandoval’s wife had been a pilgrim, vanished and presumed dead in a group penetration of the Crossbank artifact.)

Chris had gotten to know Adam Sandoval during the post-lockdown confinement in Provo. Sandoval had recovered from his coma and his burns, though his skin was still shockingly pink where it had been restored. He had been contrite about his aborted suicide attempt, but remained bellicose on the subject of his wife’s disappearance.

Introduced to Sebastian Vogel in the Provo provision line one evening, Sandoval had refused to shake Sebastian’s hand. “My wife read your book,” he said, “shortly before she decided to run off looking for transcendence, whatever that fucking word means. Don’t you ever think about the people you peddle your bullshit to?”

Last week Sebastian and Sue had left Provo to set up housekeeping in Carmel, where a friend had offered Sue a job at a real-estate firm. Sebastian was refusing interviews and had a

“Rescue” meant a terrifying roundup initiated as soon as the Blind Lake Eye began to transform itself into the familiar symmetric starfish structure. “Quarantine” meant six more months of detention under the newly enacted Public Safety Protocols. “Debriefing” meant a series of interviews with well-dressed and well-meaning government perso

Most of the population of Blind Lake had cooperated willingly. Everyone who had lived through the lockdown had a story to tell.

The last and most recent issue of Chuck Hauser’s newsmagazines contained no screaming headlines, only a guest editorial in the back pages:

…and as the fear subsides, we can begin to take account of what we’ve learned and what we have yet to understand.

Something momentous has happened, something that still defies easy comprehension. We’re told that we created, in our most complex computers, what is essentially a new form of life — or else we have assisted into existence a new generation of a very old form of life, a form of life perhaps older than the Earth itself. We have evidence from the now-defunct facilities at Crossbank and Blind Lake that this process has already happened on two life-bearing worlds elsewhere in the local neighborhood and perhaps across the galaxy.

But the “starfish” — and can’t we come up with a more elegant name for these really quite beautiful structures? — seem little interested in contacting us, much less intervening in our affairs. We have the example on UMa47/E of a sentient culture that has coexisted with the starfish for (probably) centuries, without any meaningful interaction at all.

This lends credence to those who suggest the starfish represent not only a wholly new form of life but a wholly new form of consciousness, which overlaps only minimally with our own. We have looked deep into the sky, in other words, and met at last the limits of intelligibility.

But there is the counterexample of HR8832/B, a planet on which those who constructed the quantum nuclei of the starfish have disappeared altogether. Perhaps naturally, in an extinction event, or perhaps not. Perhaps we are being offered a choice. Perhaps a species that pursues a genuine understanding of the starfish can reach that goal only by becoming something other than itself. Perhaps, to truly understand the mystery, we will have to embrace it and become it. Wasn’t it Heisenberg who observed that the seer and the seen become inextricably interlinked?